Design and evaluation of a fast MAC layer handoff management scheme for WiFi-based multichannel Vehicular Mesh Networks

Vehicular Mesh Networks (VMNs) are important components of the wireless metropolitan networks. Compared with traditional wireless networks, they are more efficient in terms of deployment, configuration, and maintenance. However, connecting all mesh routers through wireless connection in VMNs results in the network backbone's remarkably lower bandwidth. Multichannel technology, where non-interfering channels are used to enable mesh routers to send and receive packets simultaneously, can be adopted to improve the throughput of VMNs. Due to the limited radio range of mesh routers, mobile clients have to switch among different mesh routers to maintain wireless connections. Therefore, providing smooth roaming in multichannel VMNs has become an important topic in VMN research. In this paper, a novel MAC layer handoff scheme is proposed as a means of minimizing handoff latency for WiFi-based multichannel VMNs to provide smooth communication for real-time applications. By designing a dynamic grouping algorithm for channel selection and allowing mesh routers to switch their channels for probe response messages, our scheme can shorten the waiting time for the detection of available access routers, decrease the loss ratio of data packets during the handoff, and consequently achieve smooth handoff in the MAC layer.